Still been playing a lot of Baldur’s Gate, so, thanks to the bad guys being mind flayers (the dudes with octopuses for faces), I guess I’ve been thinking Octopus lately.
Obligatory reminder that it’s pronounced “neev”…
Copyright
J.B. Norman
Niamh and Kat duck around a corner in Porthaven’s Fish Market.
“I think,” Niamh says, slumping against the wall to catch her breath. “I think we got away.”
“What are we stealing this time?” Kat gasps. “And why do they want it back so bad?”
“Stealing back,” Niamh corrects with a huff.
The Half-Goblin is quite insistent on only ever stealing things that have been stolen from their rightful owners in the first place.
“Ugh,” Kat groans, seeing what’s clutched in Niamh’s hands. “Not more of those little clay chickens…”
“Yeah,” Niamh says, glancing down at the little chicken with a bowtie in her hand. “These guys are all the rage recently. There’s a huge market for them, and a huge black market for them.”
“They’re clay chickens!” Kat exclaims.
“Well, one: they’re faience chickens,” Niamh notes. “And two: they’re kinda cute, aren’t they?”
Kat rolls her eyes.
“Whatever. As long as I’m getting paid for this.”
She peers around the corner.
“I think we’re in the clear.”
“Hey!” a voice bellows. “There they are!”
“Or not,” she mutters.
“Go!” Niamh calls.
With a gang of pursuers hot on their heels, Kat and Niamh dash through the Fish Market, flying blind and heedlessly through a maze of fishmonger stalls.
Until they blunder right into a dead end.
With stalls on three sides and their pursuers closing in on the other, Niamh reaches for something, anything to throw at her pursuers. Her questing fingers find something cold, wet and squishy, but she doesn’t have time to dwell on it. Her fingers close around on… whatever it is.
She flings with all her might.
Niamh and Kat watch as an octopus goes sailing through the air.
Niamh has never heard the sound of an octopus colliding with a human head — she never even ever tried to imagine what it might sound like.
As it turns out, it’s kind of a wet, slimy, dense smacking sound. Maybe not so different from the sound of anything hitting someone in the face, only more… cephalopodal.
Niamh and Kat watch as their unlucky enemy struggles to detach the octopus from his face, his cries for help muffled by the octopus’ bulk. He blunders around the Fish Market as his companions vainly try to pry the octopus from his face.
“Wow,” Kat says. “I can’t believe that worked.”
Niamh shrugs.
“Yeah, well. Why look a gift octopus in the mouth?” she muses. “Still, this is exactly the kind of distraction we need to escape. So, let’s make like a tree and do whatever a tree would do in this situation.”
She frowns.
“That sounded better in my head.”
“Uh huh,” Kat says sceptically.
Niamh and Kat take a step forward, eager to make themselves scarce and return the faience chicken to its rightful owner.
“Ahem.”
Niamh and Kat freeze as a throat is unsubtly and aggressive cleared at them.
“Are you going to pay for that?” a thoroughly bemused fishmonger asks, pointing the direction of the gang struggling to free their companion from the octopus’ grip.
Niamh grumbles and reaches for her wallet.
Man, this whole “faience chickens” thing has really gotten away from me…
And follow me here:
If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:
Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
